Thursday, October 24, 2019

"Fair, the SoftBank-backed car subscription startup, lays off 40% of staff, sacks CFO"

Come on Masayoshi, time to act like CalPERS in the Great Recession: Sell your winners, let your losers ride, sell the ARM Holdings dammit!!
(a long cherished dream, that ARMH returns to the public market)

From TechCrunch:
As the market continues to turn against the wave of highly valued, venture-backed startups operating with little end in sight to their huge losses — Uber and WeWork being two prime examples — another startup is taking a proactive step to get ahead of the story, by cutting costs and restructuring before public opinion forces the issue on them.

Fair.com, a startup building a flexible car ownership business that is valued at $1.2 billion — backed by some $500 million in equity from Softbank and others, plus billions more dollars in debt funding — said today that it will be laying off 40% of its staff. On top of this, it is removing its CFO, Tyler Painter, the brother of the CEO and co-founder (and car business veteran) Scott Painter. He’s being replaced in the interim by Kirk Shryoc.

It’s not clear how many people 40% translates to in terms of headcount, nor which areas of the business will be affected. Fair’s CEO Painter is not disclosing the full number of employees that the company has across the US, or which parts of the business are going to be restructured. (As a marker though, there are some 539 employees listed on LinkedIn, which would work out at about 215 people.)....MORE
Earlier Today SoftBank's stock traded at 10-month lows in Tokyo.